The Forgotten Witness
by L.Hawk
Summary: The day Peter Petigrew faked his own death and framed Sirius Black, a witness was wathing through the scope of a rifle. Of course, things ended badly for said witness and his family, but that's life, isn't it?


The day after Peter Petigrew was killed, a man by the name of Juan Del Iglasias was found dead. He was a muggle, a hitman by profession, but his sister was a muggle-born witch, so he knew about the magical world. On the day Peter Petigrew was killed, he had been hired to kill another muggle, Jonathon Danialson, who was one of the muggles killed in the magical explosion. As a result of this, he was perched on a rooftop nearby, with a sniper rifle pointed in that direction. He was scanning the area, looking for Danialson, who was always in the vicinity at that time of day. Peter Petigrew's wand caught his attention, and he trained his scope on them to watch the action. He saw Peter Petigrew say the incantation and assumed that he was committing suicide. He also saw the explosion, and once he was sure that his original target was dead, he packed up his rifle and went home.

He had called his sister Anita, who was a witch, and asked if she had heard anything about what went down. She then began gushing about how she was glad that Sirius Black had been caught, because the incident had unsettled her, and she didn't want there to be a killer on the loose. It was then that he cut in and told her what he had seen. She asked him if he was sure, and he said that he was. She told him that she loved him, and would come to see him the next day.

Anita was the one who found his body. She knew a wizard had done it, because his body was not visibly marked and every single door and window was still locked. Still, seeing no alternative, she called the muggle police. She put the spare key he had given her back in his wallet and claimed that the front door was unlocked when she arrived. The police conducted a thorough investigation and found nothing, she'd let the matter drop, having expected that. Peter Petigrew's finger prints were found in the apartment, but according to their records, Peter Petigrew had died in a gas main explosion the day before and couldn't be questioned.

The day after Juan Del Iglasias died, two noteworthy things happened to his sister Anita. The first was that the man who had hired Juan to kill Jonathan Danialson, because his brother had a crush on Anita, had agreed to pay Anita half the money he was going to pay her brother, because Danialson was dead anyway. The second thing was that she received a telegram saying "Say anything and you will be next." Terrified but determined to get some class of justice for her brother, she had bought a train ticket to Paris and left London the next morning. Once in Paris, she had exchanged her money for Francs, bought a black sharpie, a French-English dictionary and a length of rope. She had then distributed the remaining money to local beggars and entered a public rest room.

That evening, the Parisian Police had found the body of Anita Del Iglasias hanging by her neck from a small bridge over the Seine. She was stark naked and written all over her body in black marker were the words "Sirius Black is innocent" and the equivalents in French and Spanish. The only other thing written on her was a note on her left palm saying, "You can't kill me now." There was also an imprint of what might have been a cassette tape in the mud below, but the tape was gone and there were no footprints to speak of. The Parisian Police after identifying Anita and determining that she had no living immediate family, had shrugged her off as just some crazy English woman, and she was cremated by the state. And for twelve years, the truth of what happened that night with Peter Petigrew remained a mystery.

A/N-I wrote this story last summer in my notebook, just to try something different, and I reread it recently and decided to post it because A) it was pretty good and B) it was finished, and as you know, finishing things is not my strong suit. Hope you enjoyed it. -LHawk


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